Live Free Or Die

by Sean Hannity

  Pelosi couldn’t even transmit the articles of impeachment in a constitutional fashion. Democrats jammed through impeachment in record time, holding a final vote on December 18. They told us impeachment was urgent; they said their case was rock-solid. Yet Pelosi said she wouldn’t formally deliver the articles to the Senate unless Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to her demands to call new witnesses and subpoena new documents. Democrats in particular wanted the Senate to haul in former national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—neither of whom the House had itself bothered to subpoena for testimony.

  McConnell set up a Senate trial based entirely on the precedent of the Bill Clinton trial. But Pelosi suddenly wanted to dictate to the U.S. Senate its job. Her very suggestions were an offense to the Constitution. That founding document gives the House the sole power to impeach—to investigate, produce evidence, and vote on articles. It was the House’s job to call Bolton and any other witnesses. The Constitution gives the Senate the sole power of a trial. The Senate had no business assisting or legitimizing Pelosi’s warped and twisted impeachment investigation, which she herself was now apparently admitting was inadequate. And Pelosi had no business telling the Senate what to do.

  Pelosi held on to the articles for nearly a month. Even Senate Democrats lost patience with her theatrics and demanded a start to the trial. But the Pelosi pressure campaign raged on. The House continued issuing new “evidence,” which they claimed bolstered their demands for new Senate witnesses. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held daily press briefings, insisting that only new witnesses would result in a “fair trial” and that anything less would amount to a Republican “cover-up.” “Leader McConnell is plotting the most rushed, least thorough and most unfair impeachment trial in modern history,” complained Schumer, even as he simultaneously claimed he had a slam-dunk case.42

  The Witness Games hit their hysterical peak on January 26, with a perfectly timed leak courtesy of the New York Times. The paper claimed—based, as usual, on unnamed sources—that Bolton was accusing Trump of a Ukrainian quid pro quo in a new book he was writing. It didn’t matter to Democrats that the Times gets everything wrong, or that the paper didn’t have a draft of Bolton’s book. (Its information came from sources who claimed to have seen it.) It didn’t matter that Bolton’s attorneys refused to confirm the contents of the report.43 Nor did it matter that Bolton was on record describing Trump’s calls with Zelensky as “warm and cordial.”44 Democrats bellowed that a trial without Bolton was no trial at all.

  Senate Republicans remained true to their constitutional duties, and none of them except Mitt Romney fell into this trap. Some of them deserve extra credit, since Schumer’s witness campaign was about more than just smearing Trump. He also hoped to use impeachment to take back the Senate by undercutting vulnerable Republicans up for reelection in 2020. The media assisted this ploy by writing nonstop articles claiming that senators like Colorado’s Cory Gardner and Arizona’s Martha McSally risked losing their seats if they didn’t capitulate to Schumer’s demands.

  Also worthy of extra credit were those Republican senators who made clear to the Senate the ramifications of Democrats’ witness demands. Texas senator Ted Cruz insisted that if the Senate sent out subpoenas, he’d demand “witness reciprocity.” For every witness Democrats called, Republicans would get to call one, too. GOP senators floated the idea of subpoenas for Quid Pro Quo Joe and Hunter Biden. They also debated calling the whistle-blower and potentially even Schiff—whose early interaction with the whistle-blower made him a fact witness in the case. The reciprocity demands rightly worried a number of Democrats. And they reminded the entire chamber that reopening the House’s partisan work by calling new witnesses would add months to the trial.

  In the end, nearly every Republican senator stood for truth, facts, and fairness—despite having to suffer a trial based on a warped and wholly partisan impeachment. They listened to Shifty Schiff and his fellow Democrat impeachment managers as they spent days on monotonous, repetitive talking points, indulging in their unhinged hatred of the president. The Schiff sham-show left even Democrats bored. Senator Elizabeth Warren was spotted during the proceedings playing a game on a piece of paper.

  The hardest part was listening to Democrats accuse Trump of all their own despicable behavior. The hypocrisy was rank. To this day, precisely one guy in Washington has been caught on tape trying to elicit dirt from foreigners on a political rival: Adam Schiff. In 2017, during Congress’s Russia collusion investigation, a Russian prankster called Schiff, pretending to be a Ukrainian official. The prankster claimed to have “pictures of naked Trump.” Schiff asked the caller if Putin was “aware” of the “compromising material.” He asked for the spellings of names.45 And he had his staff contact the prankster after the call to try to arrange delivery of the material.46 Democrats care about “foreign interference” only when it suits their political agenda.

  They impeach Trump for allegedly making threats against Ukraine? He never did. Read the transcript. But in September 2019, Democratic senator Chris Murphy actually bragged that he had threatened Ukraine’s new president with consequences if he dared looked into the Biden-Burisma scandal. “I cautioned [Zelensky] that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship,” Murphy told John Solomon.47

  This is also the same Democratic Party that had a paid operative, Alexandra Chalupa of the Democratic National Committee, working with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to spread dirt on Donald Trump.

  Republicans did confront the House impeachment team with its hypocrisy at least once, and the response was priceless. Senator Richard Burr submitted the following question for Chief Justice John Roberts to read to Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat impeachment manager: “Under the House managers’ standard, would the Steele dossier be considered as foreign interference in a U.S. election, a violation of the law and/or impeachable offense?” Jeffries was totally taken off guard. He finally replied that the “analogy” wasn’t right, since Democrats had paid for the dossier.48 Got that? It’s okay to solicit foreign dirt, so long as you get a receipt.

  Republican senators did at least get to hear, for the first time, the president’s legal team make its defense. And they crushed it. They included White House counsel Pat Cipollone; the president’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow; former independent counsel Ken Starr; former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi; and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz.

  This group methodically and overwhelmingly destroyed the Democrats’ two bogus articles of impeachment. They hammered home that the nebulous “abuse of power” article was nothing more than a made-up theory—one that “supplants the Framers’ standard of ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ ”49 And they pointed out the terrifying precedent it set. Dershowitz on the Senate floor listed more than thirty American presidents (including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln) who’d also been accused of abuse of power. “None of them was impeached,” Dershowitz said on my show. “Which shows you how vague and open-ended and selective that criteria is. It can be weaponized and used against anybody or nobody, depending on the whim of Congress.”50

  They also explained that the second article of impeachment—“obstruction of Congress”—was a blatant attempt to destroy the critically important concept of “executive privilege.” That’s a tool that allows the president to withhold sensitive information from Congress. The White House exercised the privilege during the impeachment drama, refusing to just roll over for every Democratic document demand—especially because most of those Democratic document subpoenas were fishing expeditions. As the president’s legal team explained, it is “essential to protect the President’s ability to secure candid and confidential advice and have frank discussions with his advisers.”51 Equally important, it is up to the judiciary to define when it applies. The House impeachment article was an unconstitu
tional claim that it was up to the House to decide.

  The case was thorough and compelling and convinced even wavering Republicans—like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski—that there was no need for further witnesses. On January 31, 2020, fifty-one GOP senators voted to kill that Democratic ploy. They lost only Maine’s Susan Collins and Utah’s Mitt Romney.

  Five days later, the Senate acquitted the president of the United States. The vote on “abuse of power” was 52–48. The vote on “obstruction of Congress” was 53–47. Both fell dramatically short of the sixty-seven votes needed to convict. The only Republican defector was, once again, Romney—who voted for the “abuse of power” charge. Unfortunately, Romney can’t get over the fact that he lost in 2012, and he cares too much about parading around as a media hero. He forgets that the media who lauded him for his “brave” impeachment vote was the same media that spent 2012 calling him a racist, a misogynist, and a cruel capitalist.

  All that really mattered in the end was that the president was vindicated. He’d won again. The three-year-long Democratic campaign to impeach was over. The American voters had emerged victorious.

  MAKING DEMOCRATS PAY A PRICE—ELECTION 2020

  We can’t get back what Democrats lost the country during their long impeachment march and temper tantrum. President Trump wanted to talk about infrastructure. He wanted to do a deal on lower drug prices. He wanted a debate on border security, and how best to protect the country. He proposed trade deals that would help our manufacturers. Democrats had no interest in dealing with these pressing concerns or in concentrating on the new coronavirus that was spreading out of China. They were too obsessed with their vendetta against Trump and their rage against this White House.

  The good news is that America still gets the opportunity in Election 2020 to judge them for this failure of leadership. Democrats always knew they wouldn’t be able to convict and remove Trump from office. Pelosi understood the risk of impeachment, but she caved to her radical socialist base. Democrats then threw everything they had at slandering Trump in hopes of at least softening him up for an election defeat.

  It didn’t work. The longer impeachment went on, the better the Trump reelection campaign did. Trump and the Republican National Committee raised a staggering $125 million in the third quarter of 2019;52 it raised a whopping $154 million in the fourth quarter.53 Both numbers were a direct response to impeachment—Trump supporters rejecting the Democrats’ appalling abuse of their House powers.

  Democrats never moved the polling needle on impeachment, despite months of slander and lies. Quite the opposite. In the days following impeachment, Trump’s approval rating moved to an all-time high in his presidency.54

  By contrast, the American people aren’t feeling great about Democrats’ rage-fueled approach to everything. At particular risk in this upcoming election are the thirty-one Democrats who in 2018 won districts that voted for Trump. They campaigned as moderates and as Democrats able to work with the president on a bipartisan basis. They instead spent months working to impeach him. Nearly all voted to proceed to a formal inquiry, and nearly all voted for both impeachment articles. Also up for judgment will be senators like Democrat Doug Jones, who voted to convict the president. Jones represents Alabama, a state that voted 62 percent for Trump.

  Elections allow for that voter judgment, and they remain this country’s greatest tool for accountability. Democrats can play their destructive political games. But the American people are the ultimate deciders. And come November 3, 2020, they will get to shock the world—again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Enemy of the People: The Hate-Trump Media Mob

  I’m not trying to be cute when I call the liberal press the “Fake News Media.” They collude with the leftist Democratic Party and spread lies, distortions, and propaganda. They don’t even try to hide it anymore. Even media watcher Howard Kurtz argues the media’s hatred for Trump is unprecedented. Their attacks are “more personal” and “visceral” than against any other president. “None of us have ever seen anything like this, just the sheer intensity of it,” said Kurtz. “If you only consumed a lot of the mainstream media, particularly places like MSNBC, you would think that the Trump presidency is an absolute disaster, that he’s ruining the entire world….”1

  The liberal media uniformly claim Trump is deliberately dividing the nation. “Trump’s theory of politics is that it’s okay to offend five voters if seven voters approve,” wrote Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson. “Dividing the country is the name of the game. The object is to create a coalition of the resentful. Polarization is not only the consequence. It also is the underlying purpose and philosophy.” In Samuelson’s view the media are Trump’s “scapegoats for assorted disappointments.”2

  That message surely resonated with Samuelson’s fellow Trump-hating journalists. But it conveniently ignores how the media mob has dropped all semblance of objectivity and now serves as a loyal mouthpiece for the so-called Resistance. They have gone to the most extreme lengths imaginable to undermine Trump since he was a candidate. They are the polarizing figures. They are the ones dividing the country.

  They are the ones who, more than three years into Trump’s presidency, still refuse to accept the legitimacy of his election—after responding with sputtering outrage when then-candidate Trump said he’d wait to see the election results before committing to accepting them. CNN’s take—and this was in a news report, not an opinion piece—was typical. Trump’s comments, said CNN, “marked a stunning moment that has never been seen in the weeks before a modern presidential election. The stance threatens to cast doubt on one of the fundamental principles of American politics—the peaceful, undisputed transfer of power from one president to a successor who is recognized as legitimate after winning an election.”3 Of course, when Hillary Clinton spent the next three years claiming the election had been stolen from her by diabolical Trump officials colluding with Russia—a hoax her own campaign helped create by funding the phony Steele dossier—the media dropped its dire warnings about the sanctity of election results and parroted Clinton’s accusations.

  The media’s motivation here is obvious. True, they don’t like Trump’s personality, his brashness, and his ridiculing of his opponents. But let’s face it, if Trump were a left-wing president criticizing conservatives, they’d have no problem with those qualities. No, they hate Trump because he campaigned on a conservative agenda that they find abhorrent, and now he’s implementing it. Even Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, no conservative himself, acknowledged the liberal media’s anti-Trump bias. “With some folks it seems as if there is only one allowable position when it comes to Donald Trump: He’s the most dangerous president ever, and nothing good can come of his tenure,” writes Zurawik. “Trump is being treated unfairly in some parts of the media, and unless we deal with it honestly and openly, we are the ones who will wind up losing credibility even as we point our fingers at Trump for his lies.”4

  Early on in Trump’s term, Zurawik commented that Trump’s conflict with the press wasn’t nearly as unjustifiable as Obama’s was. The Trump administration “has not yet come close to doing what President Obama’s administration did in making the act of reporting itself criminal behavior,” said Zurawik—referring to the Obama administration prying into the phone and computer records of reporter James Rosen, then with Fox News, and calling Rosen “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” and a flight risk in court documents. Zurawik also recounted how the Obama administration excluded Fox News from interviews with government officials, denounced the network as a “wing of the Republican Party,” and announced that the White House would stop treating us as a “news network.”5 Yet the media worships Obama like the Messiah and portrays Trump as a dictator. Go figure.

  The media pathologically hate Trump, but they’re dependent on him. Their sensational Trump coverage sells newspapers, resuscitating some that were on life support, and boosts ratings for cable and broadcast news. This success comes at a price, though,
because their bias has turned nearly all of conservative America against them. A 2016 Gallup poll found Republican trust in the media is at an all-time low of 14 percent,6 mainly because they portray Trump in particular and conservatives generally as stupid bigots.7

  I’m not anti-media. I work in the media. From the time of our founding Americans have recognized the media’s crucial role in holding our leaders accountable—as another important check against tyranny. But we shouldn’t assume the media’s watchdog function guarantees their integrity, fairness, or objectivity. Collectively, they wield enormous power—not just in keeping presidents, congressmen, and governors honest, but in influencing elections and policy, so much so that the press is often referred to as the fourth estate or fourth branch of government.8 The media’s influence is vast enough that they can even bring down a president, as the Washington Post did with President Nixon—a model countless reporters hope to emulate today.

  The Hoover Institution’s Bruce Thornton observes that the media has been partisan almost from the inception of the nation, but earlier in our history, the variety of outlets with competing partisan views prevented a major imbalance in the news. That balance was lost, says Thornton, during the sixties, when journalism became a “profession” credentialed by university degrees. “Before then… journalism was a working-class trade.” Most of the newsroom veterans didn’t have college degrees, and their biases “tended to reflect those of class as much as political ideology.” But journalism school graduates reflected “the leftist perspective of those institutions…. Now the old progressive view that the press should not just report fact, but mold public opinion to achieve certain political ends, served an ideology fundamentally adverse to the free-market, liberal-democratic foundations of the American Republic.”9